


Cardiography

by novelteanottes



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Extended Metaphors, F/M, Ficlet, Romance, Vignette, the whole thing is just an excuse to write metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:53:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24742618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novelteanottes/pseuds/novelteanottes
Summary: Surely it was not too out of reach to think that maybe, their hearts would align.--When Claude finds out Byleth doesn’t understand the experience of having a heart, he strives to teach her.Alternatively: how many synonyms can I find for heart-related words.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 16
Kudos: 47





	Cardiography

**Author's Note:**

> Vaguely canon-compliant post time-skip - mostly pretty words, fuzzy on the details.

So often throughout life, when emotions betray and faces lie, the heart is a steady lodestone for truth-telling. _Liar_ , Claude’s drums at him now as he tries in vain to think of anything but the color of Byleth’s smile. His pulse pit-pats like the rain, erratic and overflowing. Her smile is a blast of desert heat through his veins, the color of magma. Claude melts in it.

While Claude’s heart remains true even through the teeth of his lies, Byleth has the calm of a storm’s eye that knows not of its own confusion. So Claude teaches her when his own is throbbing too fast it feels impossible not to share. Surely it was not too out of reach to think that maybe, their hearts would align.

It is easy to explain in the rush of things.

When Byleth is pressed against his hot back a hundred miles off the ground on a wyvern, the rush is in their lungs, in the tight squeeze of their knees. Claude is laughing when he tells her, without turning, to count the physical clock of his heart ticking overtime.

He feels her pause mid-whoop to consider the individual seconds before half-shouting above the gale that it seemed much faster than seemed safe inside a mortal being. Facing front, Claude doesn’t have to perform his smirk when he replies he, unlike her, is _simply, complexly human._

It catches up with him the most in little moments. 

He moves in to brush a stray lock of sea glass hair behind her ears. Fervently, he wishes he had the courage to do this when Byleth’s hair was still the shade of conifers, to compare the texture of the newly-colored waves. They sift through his fingers when he idly twists the strands.

Her ears are small and soft, and Claude finds himself not willing to pull away. He gently rubs the tips as they turn red, the only indication that Byleth was aware of the intimacy of the action.

 _You see,_ he jokes, _blushing is a sign of blood being pumped by a heart._

 _I’m not blushing,_ Byleth blushes, but touches at her own warming ears, curious. Then she turns this on Claude and tickles him until his own ears have flamed and they are one warm mess.

It waylays him in the quieter breaths between battles.

Byleth pauses from coaxing the cats with tidbits of salmon when she spots him. She couldn’t know the uptick of his pulse, yet she somehow sees through him all the same. When she wraps him up, she doesn’t act surprised to hear the song of guilt and panic that is singing against her arms. It isn’t until the staccato rhythm settles into a grateful, mellow tempo, that she lets him go.

He starts to think a heart is too big for one person after all. His, at least, is growing one drop too heavy from spilling.

He has used a million metaphors, called the moon a million different names but its own. _It is a bowstring, drawn taut or slack and vibrating. It is the ripples across the lake, the rise and fall of waves. It is the breeze made visible across a field of wheat._

He has marched his fingers across her skin to the tune of every emotion. It is not her lack of a palpitating organ, but his own bloody one that stumps him. In his head, the thoughts lined neat and orderly are thrown into the chaos of 120 bpm.

 _Liar,_ it so helpfully reminds him, strong and insistent. But his heart is stuck in his throat, so he continues to lie with his smile.

In the midst of the hills and valleys of war and shadow mechanisms, he falls for a scheme of his own device.

For even an impenetrable metal heart might crash and restart. Claude’s feet carry him to her, and kneeling by her crumpled form, he can’t help but lay his head to her still chest and wait for some intake of air. She doesn’t seem larger than life when now curled like this, she fits on his lap.

 _You can take my heart,_ he grasps at her desperately, _if you would return to me._

It could have been a thousand or three beats before she was coughing herself awake, face upturned to his glistening eyes. He wants to kiss her bobbing throat, trace the thrumming veins to the vehicle keeping her alive time and time again.

He can no longer ignore the push and pull of the universe’s strings.

When he is next kneeling before her, it is with his whole heart on a platter, bare and pounding in sync to her special metronome.

_You are the heart of Fódlan. I have nothing to present you but promises, and my whole self that you have always owned._

_Claude von Riegan,_ She says, lifting his chin to meet hers, _You are my heart, and I must keep you close to me, always._

And so they wrote history together, the cycles of their graph able to span the distance between two hearts after all.

**Author's Note:**

> (I was falling asleep when I started drafting a vignette in my head, got 3 hours of sleep, and proceeded to spitball this 850 word FE ficlet in 6 hours. It might be more fun for me to write metaphors as a vehicle for this relationship than for you to read it, in which case, I am sorry.)  
>   
> Please let me know if you prefer actual extended stories, and any ideas accordingly.  
> twit: **@Vida_Shi**


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